I made a pretty bad mistake the other day with a mailbag post while trying to reach out to the Windows Media Center online community of grass root supporters -- those early adopters who constantly (and rightfully) push us to deliver more value. I took some information which was already public knowledge and connected dots which -- honestly -- weren't there to connect. It was a mistake on my part to infer any sort of timeframe schedule going forward. Doing so set the wrong expectations for my readers and opened up a can of speculation and question worms which were way off base. Above all, I pride myself on being a source you can trust -- and the other day I let you down -- I’ll try not to do that again. [Note to self: Read The Corporate Weblog Manifesto again.]
After reading about his poor experience working with the release candidate of Windows Vista at the last WinHEC I contacted Brier and offered to provide a Windows Media Center PC to take for a spin. Using computers prepped for events like WinHEC are always a dicey proposition -- most of the time they are multi-purpose and have therefore been touched by multiple folks with differing goals (which might not be compatible) before reaching the show floor. Throw in a beta OS and -- well -- you can almost guarantee the outcome isn't going to be very positive. Brier politely declined to take me up on the offer at that time. (Never was sure why, but my best guess was obviated with his article today.)
Brier contacted me last week via email with a note invoking that prior conversation and noting he 'ended up borrowing a TouchSmart from HP and swapped it for my living room TV for a few months' and was preparing an article on his experiences which he published today. I'll admit I literally chuckled out loud when I read his email -- the TouchSmart computer was designed for the kitchen, not the living room, so my initial reaction was 'no good can come from this'. What's a good analogy here...? Perhaps buying some great teak outdoor patio furniture and putting it in your family room is a good one. Needless to say I was interested in hearing about his experiences for better or worse so I responded and we had a great conversation.
Some thoughts after reading his article...
1) It sure would be nice if a journalist would review a Windows Media Center system as our team envisions. Let us hear about your environment, and then help you select a combination of hardware which addresses your needs and wishes. Some might say this would affect the integrity of the writer. I don't think so -- as long as the writer is up front about the assistance he got from Microsoft.
2) It would be great if the major OEMs were more selective of 'value add' software they choose to place on the machine (see Briers follow up posted this afternoon). Unfortunately Briers experience with preinstalled stuff is the norm -- sadly. But for a very few exceptions, whenever I help family and friends purchase a new computer I have it delivered to my house first where I perform a clean install of the operating system to avoid this stuff. Some folks, particularly on our OEM team, might go nuts when they read this, since OEMs are our bread and butter. Wake up -- this stuff degrades the user experience far too much. I know, sounds strange coming from a platform guy -- but this stuff *has* to get better folks -- plain and simple. Build GREAT software on the platform -- or choose NOT to ship the software.
3) My comment to Brier "I would really like for somebody to do a follow-up or a couple of follow-ups — they seem to put these great things out there, but there's not a version 2 or a version 3" was in the context of driving the costs down on great form factors for the living room. We've already got some great boxes designed as dedicated machines for your stereo stack -- but unfortunately the price points remain fairly high on them. It is interesting to note that for $400 less than the cost of the TouchSmart you can have an HP m7790e for the home office with almost exactly the same specs for the internals (processor, memory, etc.) plus an XBox 360 (with built in Media Center Extender) and a brand new high quality wired + wireless router (total for all of that is $1,400 as priced tonight, compared to $1,800 for the TouchSmart). More bang. Less buck.
Oh, and the offer still stands, Brier -- aren't you curious to see how well this stuff works as originally designed? 
When = Soon, but difficult to say exactly when as each OEM works on finalizing their offerings. The Windows Media Center team is working with each to make sure these make it to market as soon as possible. (Yeah, I know -- this sounds like a total non-answer -- it's really the best information I have at the moment.)
Where = Dell, Sony, Velocity Media, Toshiba and Niveus Media have announced they will be selling CableCard equipped Windows Media Center systems. Take your pick and start monitoring those OEM websites for ordering details.
Reading this question last night compelled me to make a meeting today where our Windows Media Center MVPs learned more about Windows Home Server from Charlie Kindel and another gentleman from the team (I had to cut out and go to a feature team meeting before I could get his name -- but I'll circle back). I expect those MVPs will be able to give you additional thoughts, but here is a start.
In a nutshell...
Windows Home Server: Helping families with multiple PCs connect their digital experiences, providing a familiar and reliable way to store, access, share and automatically protect what is most important. *
Windows Media Center: Helping families enjoy the digital experiences stored on the PC from the comfort of their couch or in other rooms of the house with an intuitive and easy to use interface. **
In other words, two separate products with goals that are highly complementary to each other. Based on what little I saw today they will each benefit *immediately* once Windows Home Server ships. Longer term, I believe we will see the two product teams collaborating more -- perhaps even creating features unique to the intersection of Windows Media Center + Windows Home Server. After the presentation today I'm definitely going to replace my Windows Server 2003 box here at home with a Windows Home Server and start playing around to find the synergies and goodness.
* This came from an excellent post by Charlie: Why Doesn't Windows Home Server do foo? Go there to learn more about their vision and goals -- it's also a good post on feature development work in general.
** I made this up to kinda, sorta match up with the Windows Home Server mission statement for contrast. It's not 'official' marketing blurb -- but is a pretty good description of the Windows Media Center goal.
[Kinda like the way that title rhymes. Anywho...]
I just love the way Ed Bott seems to be able to cut through all the hyperbole and bring some reality to the conversation. As usual, he is able to put the whole Windows Vista adoption rate into perspective. Check out his Slow start for Vista? So what else is new?
I promised Ian Dixon a few days ago I would start a new series of posts here at Retrosight for end users of Windows Media Center and since the MVPs are in town getting ready to ask quite a lot of questions I thought I would kick things off a little earlier than he expects. I'm going call these posts 'Mailbag' (modeled after Aaron) and they will be totally community driven.
So...
Leave your question as a comment for this post -- I'll answer one per comment in the order in which they are posted. If you leave more than one question per comment, I'll answer your first one and ignore the rest to give everyone a chance to ask. I'll shoot for one per week, but may be more or less depending on my bandwidth and how involved the questions or answers become.
Update: I just answered the first, and had to gently wordsmith the question a little bit to post in the title. If you post a question and I wordsmith to make things clearer, and you think I changed the question in the process, post a comment on my answer post (not here) and I'll try to clarify.
[You can see this coming...] There will inevitably be some questions I probably won't be able to answer with as much detail as you wish (like 'Can you list out the entire feature set for the next version?') -- but I will make every effort to give you a meaningful answer.
What do you want to know about the Windows Media Center product or team?
More stuff from Thomas to chew on in How To Turn Microsoft Around. I'm glad he caveated the post at the beginning and end with the note about armchair quarterbacking. I'm glad to see some folks setting the record straight in the comments over on his blog, so I would encourage you to go read those. Anywho, my two cents about what Thomas wrote follows -- please go read his entire post -- I'm just going to try and boil it down to the action items he recommends in summary.
1) "...create a Microsoft certification whereby thoroughly tested systems receive a special Microsoft seal of approval. This would be reserved only for PCs that met the most rigorous testing requirements."
Done -- see http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/hwrequirements.mspx. I expect Thomas' answer will be 'that's broke, you need something better'. My belief: Our ecosystem of partnerships (Chris loves it when I use that particular group think Microsoft-ism) isn't broke, and in many ways is quite healthy.
2) "Microsoft should spend $3 billion buying everything cool that it can get it's hands on irrespective of the busness outlooks of the individual internet properties. By combining these properties into something cool they *can* build a presence yet on the net."
Yikes. Throwing money around 'irrespective of the business outlook' is absolutely irresponsible, both to our employees and shareholders. The logic here doesn't make sense to me at all: Ignore the business fundamentals and make a decision solely on a nebulous perception of 'cool'. Friendster used to be cool, and now seems to be a footnote in the annals of Web 2.0 supplanted by MySpace and Facebook. Let's chat in 10-20 years and see how sound an investment it was to shell out $1.65 billion for YouTube or $35 million for Flickr -- I for one largely think the jury is still out on those. Anyone remember the dotcom bust around 2000? That was largely fueled by just this sort of approach in regards to investment. No thanks -- been there, done that, got the t-shirt (which is the only thing left for my personal 10 grand -- ouch).
3) "Open an incubator in San Francisco."
Done. How about Redmond, Cambridge, Bangalore and Beijing as well. Don't forget our university partnerships either. Not to mention we fund more 'startups' than you can imagine outside of these research groups in product groups themselves. In fact, Windows Media Center (itself a internal startup which has been highly sucessful, shipping 5 great versions in 5 years) just recently spun off its own startup group (can't say more, sorry). Heck, why limit it to only what we can do ourselves -- we should think about how we invest in others. Oh, wait -- that's done too: http://microsoftstartupzone.com/. Don't get me wrong: San Francisco is a lovely place -- but not the only place -- for great ideas and startups.
4) "Rather than one or two top evangelists though they should hire about 30 of these connectors and also give them direct access to the executives making the business decisions at Microsoft."
Evangelism works best when it's grass roots (I think Robert would tend to agree with me here). I think the answer here is not bringing in folks from outside as high profile connectors but rather encouraging and increasing the profile of folks from within. (I'm pretty sure MiniMicrosoft would agree.)
Thomas, you should seriously think about joining Microsoft personally -- you've got the right mindset that change is good -- come and work for a company that really believes that and empowers you to make it happen.
'XP Sucks.'
That's how it ended -- at least for me.
And that's what I was disappointed about yesterday. Thomas made some good points in his post and then proceeded to render them moot with this final, childish hubris. I didn't make that clear in my previous post -- I shouldn't have used the word 'disappointed' twice. While I was sad to see Thomas move to Mac, I've long since gotten over that (and he and others would be interested to know how I dealt with my feelings, but that's a story for another day). My post wasn't about Mac vs. Windows -- that's been done to death (note to folks: the horse is dead).
Why was I disappointed?
Because Thomas is a great guy, and a great spokesman for Zooomr -- and I hate to see his passion get the better of him. In order for Zooomr to be successful on a large scale it has to appeal to the broad market, which includes Windows users. Having the CEO of your company say 'your choice of operating system was stupid' stands a good chance of alienating customers with those operating systems.
Take the high road Thomas -- don't become a fanboy for anyone -- even if for the briefest moment.
I've remained silent about Thomas moving most of his computing to the Mac simply because I was so very disappointed to lose him as a resource to make Windows Media Center a better experience. I was pretty amazed to see him so quickly jump on the 'Get a Mac' bandwagon with Chris' latest post given (1) a majority of his problems with Windows at the time he 'switched' seemed to stem from his chosen OEM and (2) as far as I know he doesn't have a ton of experience with Windows Vista to objectively compare it to MacOS. In his defense, he might have a ton of experience with Windows Vista but hasn't posted about it (yet).
For the record, Thomas commands my respect with regards to his computing experiences.
But today, he lost some of his shine with me -- I was very disappointed by the way he ended this post today.
[This is probably the first of a series of posts...]
I've been falling in love with Windows all over again recently with Windows Vista.
While creating the Diamond SDK we had to edit the file redistribution list heavily because we added a ton of new resources. See C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Media Center\v5.0\License\redist.txt for this -- it tells you what files we give you permission as a developer to redistribute in some form or fashion with your apps.
To generate this list, I installed a release candidate of the SDK and pulled out one of my rarely used, but favorite tools to enumerate the files and folders exactly as they appear in the file system post-install: FileGrab. When you drop files from Explorer onto the FileGrab window, you get a list of filenames, instead of the files' contents. You can save the list to disk, print it, or copy it to the Clipboard for pasting into another application. View options let you choose which file characteristics (such as date, size, or attributes) to include with the filenames.
FileGrab was created by Michael Mefford at PC Magazine...
...for Windows 95.
I have run it on every version Microsoft has shipped since -- including Windows Vista.
This is one of the hallmark features for which I consistently rank Windows above all other operating systems I've used over the years with each subsequent release (which would include MacOS, Linux, Solaris and BeOS among others): Its ability to run the software I like to use even if it was written light years ago in computing time.
FileGrab has worked great for me the last 10 years. As with any software though, eventually, at some point, it can be improved. While FileGrab has always met the need, each time I leveraged there were always a few improvements I would have made for my personal use. For example...
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It has more features than I personally need -- extended file attributes, the ability to print the enumerated list as a couple of examples.
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A feature missing which I always yearned for -- the ability to enumerate files or folders or both during a drag and drop operation and denote folders with a trailing slash ('\').
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A mildly annoying feature I would call a 'bug' today that, at the time it was created, could certainly have been a limitation of the underlying platform -- a fixed length (number of characters) for the file name which resulted in unecessary white space in the text.
So, while on a recent vacation I finalized a new tool inspired by FileGrab called FileAndPath to address these issues. When you drop files from Windows Explorer onto the FileAndPath window, you get the following at the time of the operation...
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A list of file names or folder names or both.
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Full path or file / folder name only.
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An optional trailing slash ('\') added to folder names.
The options for the generated list are limited to saving to disk or copying to the clipboard.
So, take your pick -- both tools (though written ten years apart) run just fine on Windows Vista.
FileGrab: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,550871,00.asp
FileAndPath: http://blog.retrosight.com/content/binary/FileAndPath.zip
Seeing Omar post how he converts his digital video camera files reminded me of a tool I developed which ships with the Windows Media 9 Series Encoder Software Development Kit and used with the Windows Media 9 Series Encoder. Folks less accustomed to command line approaches and more familiar with GUI tools should like this resource. As I recall, the Windows Media Encoder Script will cover more of the options available in the Encoder compared to this graphical tool -- but for most consumers (and even some professional shops) the GUI approach will be more than enough. Here is a quick feature list...
- Input formats. Accepted formats for input files are .avi, .wav, .mp3, .mpg, .wma, and .wmv. Input files can include extended content (such as script), but this content is not included in the output.
- Output formats. Accepted formats for output files are .wma and .wmv.
- Profiles. This sample supports saved .prx files. Windows Media Encoder includes several of these, but you can also create your own using Windows Media Profile Editor.
- Video preprocessing. Video preprocessing modes such as deinterlacing, inverse telecine, and process interlacing are supported.
- DRM profiles. Content can be protected using a DRM profile that you have created or imported using Windows Media Encoder.
- Cropping. You can specify the number of pixels to crop from video.
- Two-pass encoding. If the selected profile allows it, two-pass encoding can be used to improve the quality of the encoded content.
- Display properties. Title, description, author, rating, and copyright information can be specified per file or per group.
- Postview. The encoding progress is displayed in a postview window. This postview can be disabled to allow the encoding process to use more resources. The postview does not appear in certain situations, such as when encoding only audio or during the first pass of two-pass encoding.
- Progress and status. This sample provides feedback for the current source file, such as the percentage completed and the encoding status.
- Saved encoding sessions. Encoding sessions can be saved and reused, including all settings, the input source list, and the output file list with their settings.
- Default settings. Current settings can be saved for use each time this sample application is started. A Default.xml file is created in the folder where the sample executable file is located.
- Error logging. Error logging can be helpful for identifying issues with files that did not get encoded during the batch encoding process, or to troubleshoot problems in the source code if you want to modify this sample or use it as the basis for your own solution. An ErrorLog.xml file is created in the folder where the sample executable file is located.
- XML. All saved sessions, default settings, and error logs are in XML format and can be viewed with the XML editor or parser of your choice.
I just installed on Windows Vista and tested it out -- everything seems to be working just fine (another post on that coming soon). With a default installation path for the SDK, look for the compiled tool and readme in C:\WMSDK\WMEncSDK9\samples\vb\batcher\. Full source code for Visual Basic .NET (2002) is included in the same folder if you want to add features. Note I haven't investigated what the upgrade path for this source code looks like for Visual Basic 2005 -- your mileage may vary. And for those of you who read this blog for the Windows Media Center goodness -- yes, this could be adapted to transcode DVR-MS files ***IF*** the Windows Media Encoder supported DVR-MS -- which it doesn't. Not to despair, though. Stephen Toub has a tool I use regularly to make those conversions -- grab it from Fun with DVR-MS.
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